Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Apple released its fiscal Q3 2011 (calendar year Q2 2011) results on Tuesday, and the results were not just great, but also showed a rather shocking stat: after only 1 1/2 years of sales, the iPad is now worth more to Apple than its Macs are.

During the quarter ended June 25, 2011, Apple sold 9.25 million iPads for $6 billion in revenue (that is a 183 percent unit increase year-over-year). In comparison, it sold 3.95 million Macs for $5.1 billion in revenue (a 14 percent increase year-over-year).

The company also sold 20.34 million iPhones in the quarter, worth $13.3 billion in revenue.

As expected, and as more people move to smartphones and tablets for their music, standalone iPods continued to drop. Year-over-year, iPod sales dropped 20 percent, to 7.54 million units.

Overall, Apple posted record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion and record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share. In the same period in 2010, Apple had revenue of $15.70 billion and net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion, or $3.51 per diluted share, which means they nearly doubled their revenue and more than doubled their net profit, year-over-year. International sales accounted for 62 percent of revenue.

Earlier, Apple, which traditionally lowballs its guidance, had projected earnings of $5.50 a share on revenue of $25 billion. Wall Street had expecting earnings of $6.45 a share on revenue of $27.7 billion.

Not only have iPads overtaken Macs in terms of their effect on Apple's bottom line, the iPhone and iPad now represent about two-thirds of Apple's revenue. Last year, the iPhone and iPad represented 48 percent of Apple’s overall sales.

During their analyst conference call, Apple also added the following:

A "product transition" in the September quarter that may hamper margins (but no further details were given). We can guess at an iPhone 4S or iPad 3, or both.

The company reiterated that the iPhone and iPad are strong in the Enterprise.

The company noted that the iPad 2 is indeed cannibalizing MacBook sales.

In terms of its "bank account," Apple ended the quarter with $12.1 billion in cash and cash equivalents. It also had another $16.3 billion in short-term marketable securities.